Illustrated Glossary: Capitalist Realism
Historically, the term “Capitalist Realism” was first coined in a 1963 art exhibition in Düsseldorf, Germany, titled Demonstration for Capitalist Realism, featuring artists like Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. The exhibition focused on works that reflect the growing consumerist culture in Germany, with some influences from its American aesthetic counterpart, Pop-Art. In the same year, Sigmar Polke co-founded the Capitalist Realism art movement, which, like Pop-Art and Andy Warhol, embraced and introduced the trend of advertising and publicity in the popular press to art. Works from this movement use common consumerist objects and render them aesthetic subjects of art.
It’s important to understand the historical Capitalist Realism movement in contrast to Socialist Realism, a style of idealized realism that aligns with the socialist state’s governing ideology, employed by the Soviet Union. While the West had Capitalist Realism saturated by consumerist objects, the Eastern bloc had Socialist Realism, compressed of state-issued narratives.
Today, the most common and famous understanding of the term comes from Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? In the book, Fisher introduces the philosophical concept of Capitalist Realism, which he explains as “a widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” As he sees it, the term should not be confined to art and advertising, but be taken as a general philosophy that governs contemporary society. Today, Capitalist Realism in art should be understood as more than pop-art that centers around publicity and consumerist goods. It also refers to aesthetic creations and rhetorical narratives that confirms to the neo-liberal aesthetics, which constantly absorbs and marketize dissenting narratives and art creations. To put it another way, Capitalist Realism in art today describes not the content of artworks, but the principles of the art world primarily as a marketplace.
